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Author: John Hanno
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Bogan High School. Worked in Alaska after the earthquake. Joined U.S. Army at 17. Sergeant, B Battery, 3rd Battalion, 84th Artillery, 7th Army. Member of 12 different unions, including 4 different locals of the I.B.E.W. Worked for fortune 50, 100 and 200 companies as an industrial electrician, electrical/electronic technician.
Op-Ed: As the world questions globalization, China will become the big loser
Minxin Pei – April 14, 2022
China has been the world’s largest exporter, shipping $3.3 trillion in goods last year. (Eric Risberg / Associated Press)
Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine has accelerated the division of the world into two blocs, one comprising the world’s democracies, and the other its autocracies. This has exposed the risks inherent in economic interdependence among countries with clashing ideologies and security interests. And although the coming deglobalization process will leave everyone worse off, China stands to lose the most.
Of course, China was headed toward at least a partial decoupling with the United States well before Russia invaded Ukraine. And it has been seeking to ensure that this process happens on its terms, by reducing its dependence on U.S. markets and technology. To that end, in 2020 China unveiled its so-called dual-circulation strategy, which aims to foster domestic demand and technological self-sufficiency.
And yet, last year, China was still the world’s largest exporter, shipping $3.3 trillion in goods to the rest of the world, with the U.S. its leading export market. In fact, overall trade with the U.S. grew by more than 20% in 2021, as total Chinese trade reached a new high. Trade with the European Union also grew, reaching $828 billion, even as disagreements over human rights torpedoed a controversial EU-China investment agreement.
That agreement had been born of the belief that Europe would maintain strategic neutrality in the Sino-American cold war in order to reap the economic benefits of engagement with China. But if human rights concerns were enough to convince the European Parliament not to ratify the deal, Russia’s war against Ukraine — in which China has tacitly supported Russia, and which has pushed the U.S. and the EU closer together — seems likely to drive the EU toward a broader economic decoupling from China.
One cannot blame Western democracies or their autocratic adversaries for prioritizing security over economic welfare. But they must brace for the economic consequences. And a middle-income autocracy like China will bear a far larger cost than rich democracies like the U.S. and its European allies.
For starters, China will suffer from reduced access to major Western markets. In 2021, Chinese merchandise exports to the U.S., the EU, and Japan — accounting for 38% of total exports — amounted to nearly $1.3 trillion. If China’s access to these three markets is halved over the next decade — a likely scenario — the country will need other markets to absorb roughly 20% of its exports, worth some $600 billion (based on 2021 trade data).
Here, China appears to have no good options. China’s dual-circulation strategy indicates that not even its leaders expect other external markets to pick up the slack left by the U.S. and its allies. And China’s apparent belief that domestic demand can offset this loss also seems farfetched.
High debt, rapid population aging, and an imploding real-estate sector will continue to hamper GDP growth, while sharp income inequality, soaring housing costs, and inadequate social protections will constrain consumer demand. The closure of factories producing goods for export, and the associated job losses, will exacerbate these challenges further. A significant share of China’s infrastructure — especially energy and transportation networks — will be underused or even become redundant.
Aside from facing shrinking export markets, China will lose access to the technologies it needs to build a knowledge economy. U.S. sanctions have already crippled telecom giant Huawei and prevented SMIC, a semiconductor manufacturer, from getting its hands on the most advanced technologies. If the U.S. persuades the EU and Japan to revive the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) to choke off technology flows to China — a prospect made more likely by the Ukraine war — China will have little chance of winning the technology race with the U.S.
The third key cost of deglobalization for China is harder to measure, but it may well turn out to be the highest: the loss of efficiency gains from dynamic competition. Products made and sold in China are of a far higher quality today than they were two decades ago, largely because Chinese companies must compete with their Western rivals. But if they are insulated from such pressure, they will not face pressure to produce higher-quality products at lower cost. This will hamper innovation and hurt consumers.
All of these costs might be bearable if economic decoupling actually made China more secure. And, at first, it might seem to be doing just that, with China reducing its vulnerability to the kinds of economic and financial weapons that the West has deployed against Russia. But as China’s economic might declines, so will its position on the global stage and the Communist Party’s status at home.
Seven decades ago, Mao Zedong embraced economic self-reliance and foreign-policy militancy, which turned China into an impoverished pariah state. This history should be a stark warning to President Xi Jinping. If he allows Russia, China’s “no limits” strategic partner, to divide the world with its war on Ukraine, it is China that will pay the heaviest price.
Minxin Pei is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.
The cycle of war in Ukraine’s south: drones, bombs, silence, death
Nabih Bulos – April 13, 2022
With an overcast sky offering a break from the ever-watchful eyes of Russian drones and the artillery barrages that often follow, a young Ukrainian soldier joined his squad for a bit of fresh air on the patio of what had been a cultural center.
“When it’s good weather the Russians can correct their targeting with the drones,” said Nesquik, a 26-year-old with the smooth face of a boy whose nickname comes from a chocolate drink. “Today, they’re just shooting where they think the targets are — they have artillery to spare.”
The thud of explosions rumbled somewhere in the distance.
You hear little else in Posad Pokrovske, a farming hamlet in southern Ukraine transformed into a tableau of destruction: Houses with gap-toothed roofs or entire wings gutted by artillery. A starving pig trotting down a crater-riddled street searching for food. The side of the village school slashed open by a blast, spilling concrete blocks and schoolbooks into the playground. And silence.
Fighting in Posad Pokrovske, Ukraine, destroyed the village school. (Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times)
In the almost seven weeks since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to invade, Ukrainian troops have pushed back the front line in the south from the edge of Mykolaiv, a vital port nearly 70 miles northeast of the Black Sea city of Odesa, to the southeast toward Kherson, the first and — so far — only major city occupied by the Russians.
That drew the fight out of the dense urban areas and onto the plains astride the M14 highway, leaving wheat fields littered with the spent tubes of Smerch cluster rockets and antitank weapons. Farming villages with birch-lined streets and quaint cottages became sites of clashes of men and armor.
Posad Pokrovske, which lies almost exactly equidistant between Mykolaiv and Kherson, is the last point under Ukrainian control. Russian troops are less than a mile away on the village edge, but they were inside until March 13, when Nesquik’s group, which had mobilized from Odesa and was tasked with liberating a string of villages in the area, entered Posad Pokrovske and surprised them.
A man with a dog searches a building hit by Russian rockets in the southern Ukraine village of Zelenyi Hai. (Bulent Kilic / AFP-Getty Images)
“They didn’t expect to see us here, but when they did, they came at us with technicals, tanks, artillery, infantry,” he said, nodding at a row of half-destroyed buildings down the street.
“Most of the damage you see is from that day.”
Since then, the fight in the village has become a game of hide-and-seek-then-kill, each side struggling to find an opening and drive the other back. But with Moscow reorienting its forces to focus on Ukraine’s Donbas region, the battle is set to change again: Rather than aiming for Odesa, Russian troops are hunkering down to secure their rear while they push toward the east in what may become the bloodiest campaign of the war.
A vegetable warehouse burns after an artillery barrage in the village of Shevchenkove, Ukraine. (Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times)
“They’re not attacking. Instead, we’re seeing the Russians now build defenses, and we’re trying not to let them do this,” Nesquik said. “They understand that with the Dnieper River behind them in Kherson, they have nowhere to go. If they’re pushed out, they won’t be able to come back.”
Such is the hope of a young man with a gun and a country to save. Skirmishes have been replaced by artillery duels between the two sides, slowly denuding life from the territory one barrage at a time.
Posad Pokrovske once had some 2,300 residents; none remain. Over in Shevchenkove, a sleepy village four miles up the road toward Mykolaiv, more than two-thirds of the people have disappeared, said Father Pavlo, the priest presiding over St. John Church. That figure feels like a large underestimate.
With gilt-framed portraits of Jesus, Mary and St. Joseph looking down on him, Father Pavlo, a soft-spoken man in his late 40s with blue eyes and a pony tail, sighed and gave a wry smile when asked about the state of his parish.
“We have five different denominations in the village. This is an Orthodox church, but right now, we’re like a big family,” he said.
Around him were stacked boxes of rice, muesli, cookies, crackers and black pouches of something called “Coconutty Curry.” By way of explanation, he pointed at the boxes, saying that the church had become in effect a community assistance center.
“We started collecting donations from friends, from the Mykolaiv government. We have people with their cars delivering assistance, evacuating people,” he said. Those with houses still intact were hosting those whose homes had been damaged in the fighting, he added.
“We also try to help the injured, or take the dead.”
There had been no lack of both in recent days. A few hours earlier on Monday, a shell injured one man, and the evening before an artillery round killed another resident. Two were killed the day before that. Earlier in the war, the head of the local council was killed, local media reported, and the mayor was kidnapped by the Russians last month when he went to deliver aid to other villages. He’s thought to be held somewhere in Crimea. Then four days ago, a barrage snapped through some of the power lines, knocking out electricity and forcing whoever remained here to rely on generators.
Those events had joined a lengthening litany of afflictions and mourning for the dead. Asked about those who still remained, Father Pavlo’s eyes turned a shiny red and his lips quivered. He turned and walked away. He looked at a painting of one of the saints until he regained his composure.
“For 10 years I’ve tried to build the church,” he said. “It’s hard, of course. Now I’m happy when people leave to a safe area. I’m upset if someone returns because it’s too dangerous.”
Those still here, he said, “have no choice but to stay,” immobilized either because of ill health, old age or taking care of someone.
One of those in the last category was Natalya Steblina, 41, a surprisingly jovial woman who stayed with her 82-year-old mother, two grandsons, a dog and a cat.
“Yes, I’m afraid, but what can I do? I hope it will be OK. I don’t want to leave. My grandsons, my mom, none of them want to leave. So we help each other,” she said. The cat rubbed against her leg (she wore shorts despite the cold) as explosions thundered somewhere over the horizon.
“When they want, they do that,” she said, cocking her ear at the sound of the barrage.
“Day, night, any time.”
Yet even in the relative safety of Mykolaiv, some 12 miles to the northeast, there is still fear. An industrial yet elegant ship-building hub on the confluence of two rivers, the city has regained some of its daily rhythms.
The weekend saw brisk pedestrian traffic on its avenues and riverfront boulevards, with people enjoying a sunny day and shrugging off the morbid thoughts of the first weeks of war. Many crowded into liquor stores (they only open on weekends) to load up. But night brought the familiar drumbeat of explosions once again, including a blast that sent windows across the city rattling and pushed Vitaliy Kim, Mykolaiv’s pugnacious regional governor, to issue a video the next day reassuring residents.
A Ukrainian soldier in the southern village of Zelenyi Hai, between Kherson and Mykolaiv. (Bulent Kilic / AFP-Getty Images)
Meanwhile, for any who believe Mykolaiv is clear of danger, the wreckage of the regional administration building — the entire middle section was clawed out by a Russian ballistic missile late last month, killing 38 people, authorities say — stands as a powerful counterargument.
Mykolaiv Mayor Oleksandr Senkevich visited the site this week, squinting in the sun as he gazed at the pancaked floors and an air-conditioning unit suspended from a wire somehow still attached to the building’s roof.
“When people ask me if it’s safe to stay, I tell them 10 civilians died last week and more than 40 were injured. If that sounds safe to you, then stay. But I think you should leave, so we can fight more easily,” Senkevich said, adding that hundreds were being shuttled to the border with Moldova every day.
A onetime IT entrepreneur turned politician, Senkevich had traded his suit for gray tactical pants, a fleece sweatshirt and a short-nozzled AK-47SU equipped with a silencer and flash suppressor. It was a switch he had done in the run-up to the invasion, but he kept it on because he didn’t see a respite coming.
“We need to be prepared for any kind of situation, especially when we see the Russian troops are now regrouping,” he said.
“People even sometimes forget that there’s war. I would say that people feel too comfortable.”
Former Russian lawmaker fighting for Ukraine says he thinks Putin’s days are numbered because ‘no dictator can survive after losing the war’
Sophia Ankel – April 14, 2022
Ilya Ponomarev.Valentyn Ogirenko
A Russian politician who was ousted in 2016 is fighting alongside Ukrainian forces.
Ilya Ponomarev told CNN Wednesday that he believed Putin’s days in power were numbered.
He called Putin a dictator and said he was confident Ukrainian forces “will prevail.”
A former Russian lawmaker fighting for Ukraine told CNN Wednesday he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s days were numbered because “no dictator can survive after losing the war.”
Ilya Ponomarev has been living in Kyiv, Ukraine, since 2016 after he was ousted by the Russian parliament. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the former politician took up arms and joined the Ukrainian forces.
Speaking from Kyiv, Ponomarev told CNN he decided to fight alongside Ukrainian troops because he wanted “to defend humanity and Europe.” His role in the forces was unclear.
“No dictator can survive after losing the war,” Ponomarev said of Putin, adding that the Russian leader “has no way how he can win the war.”
“Putin will try to claim a certain victory — an imaginary victory — on May 9. I am absolutely certain about this, but the reality is that he is losing the war,” he added. “I think that the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian people will not stop before Ukrainian territory will be free”
You can watch the full interview here:
Former member of Russian Parliament Ilya Ponomarev talks to CNN's @jaketapper about why he is fighting on the front lines with Ukrainian forces. pic.twitter.com/I6dnGuD4pl
May 9, otherwise known as Victory Day, is a major holiday in Russia that commemorates the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and is usually marked with a huge military parade in front of the Kremlin.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said last month that Russian troops were being told the war must end on May 9.
Western officials say Putin will want to have control of the Donbass and other eastern regions of Ukraine by that date, according to CNN.
Ponomarev, who has opposed Putin in the past, was a member of the Russian parliament from 2007 to 2016, Reuters reported. In 2014, he became the only member of the parliament to vote against annexing Crimea.
Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who shared photos of the trip, and Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana visited the Kyiv suburbs and mass graves in nearby Bucha. Daines said the world needed to see what Russian President Vladimir Putin had done.
“There is indisputable evidence of Putin’s war crimes everywhere—the images of shallow mass graves filled with civilians, women and children are heart wrenching,” Daines said in a statement. “America and the world need to know about Putin’s atrocities against the innocent people of Ukraine now, not after time has passed and the aftermath of evil and bloodshed have been cleaned up.”
The bodies of 410 civilians were removed from Bucha and other suburbs in the aftermath of Russia’s destruction, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, Iryna Venediktova, said this month.
Daines said he was invited to meet with Ukrainian officials in Kyiv and Bucha after he met with leaders in NATO countries bordering Ukraine. Late last month, he joined a bipartisan congressional delegation that visited Poland and Germany.
Spartz, the first Ukrainian-born member of Congress, recently sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging the Biden administration to redeploy U.S. diplomats to Lviv to help with coordination in Ukraine.
“We must be engaged to stop this atrocity and bring back peace and order to the European content,” she wrote.
State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters at a briefing Thursday that the agency is “constantly evaluating and re-evaluating the safety and the security situation,” saying the goal is to re-establish a U.S. diplomatic presence as soon as it is “safe and practical” to do so.
He argued that the lack of U.S. diplomatic presence on the ground “has in no way hampered our ability to coordinate and to consult with our Ukrainian partners.”
Ukrainian defenders in Mariupol are tying up a ‘significant’ amount of Russian forces that are needed elsewhere for Putin’s invasion, UK says
Jake Epstein – April 14, 2022
A Ukrainian serviceman guards his position in Mariupol, Ukraine, Saturday, March 12, 2022.
Ukraine’s defense of Mariupol is bogging down ‘significant’ numbers of Russian troops and equipment.
Besieged Mariupol has remained in Ukrainian control, despite weeks of widespread shelling.
According to UK intelligence, Putin’s forces will need more troops to continue the invasion.
Ukrainian defenders in besieged Mariupol are tying up a “significant” amount of Russian troops and equipment that will soon be needed elsewhere, UK intelligence said on Thursday.
Russian forces are preparing for a renewed offensive in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, the UK’s Ministry of Defense tweeted, and will need a large number of troops to do so.
But President Vladimir Putin’s troops may be limited by the ongoing campaign to capture Mariupol, which has remained under Ukrainian control despite constant bombardment by Russian forces.
The strategic southern port city has been surrounded for weeks by the Russian military, which has launched a devastating bombing campaign against the city. Russia has targeted civilian areas, including schools, shelters, theaters, and hospitals.
Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “tens of thousands” of Ukrainian civilians could be dead in Mariupol.
Western and NATO officials have said Russian troops repositioned away from the country’s northern region to focus on the Donbas after failing to capture the capital city Kyiv.
UK intelligence said Russia is trying to concentrate its forces ahead of the offensive and using “widespread” shelling tactics, adding that the upcoming military campaign would require “significant force levels.”
“It could be a big war in Donbas — like the world has not seen in hundreds of years,” Zelenskyy warned.
Ukraine warned residents of the region to evacuate ahead of the upcoming offensive. Last week, dozens were killed in a Russian rocket strike on a train station in Kramatorsk as civilians tried to flee the area.
A Visit to the Crime Scene Russian Troops Left Behind at a Summer Camp in Bucha
Simon Shuster/Bucha, Ukraine – April 13, 2022
A crane lifts a corpse from a mass grave in Bucha; authorities say more than 400 civilians were murdered Credit – Rodrigo Abd—AP
Something terrible happened in the basement of the children’s summer camp in Bucha. The steps leading down to its unlocked door were lousy with trash from Russian army rations: dried macaroni, empty juice boxes, tins of meat. Standing at the bottom of the stairwell, Volodymyr Roslik, the camp groundskeeper, looked up and raised an eyebrow at me, as if to offer one more chance to reconsider going in.
The airless tunnel behind that door resembled a series of torture chambers divided by concrete walls. There was a room that appeared to be used for executions at the front, its walls pocked with bullet holes. In the next room stood two chairs, an empty jug and a wooden plank. In another the Russians had brought in two metal bedsprings and leaned them against the wall. To Ukrainian investigators, the tableaus suggested that prisoners were tortured here: tied to the bedsprings and interrogated; strapped to the plank and waterboarded.
“The signs of torture were also on the bodies,” says Taras Shapravskyi, the deputy mayor of Bucha. Five dead men in civilian clothes were found in that chamber, he told me. “They had burns, bruises, lacerations.” It was dark when the groundskeeper took me there the following week and shined a flashlight in the room where they had lain. Two trails of dried blood ran down a wall into the dirt, next to a fleece hat that appeared to have a bullet hole.
Dead bodies found in the basement of a children’s summer campAnastasia Vlasova—Getty Images
The Russian forces withdrew in the first days of April from this commuter town 15 miles outside the Ukrainian capital. Before the invasion, Bucha was well known in Kyiv as a place to get away, to drop kids off at the summer camp for a couple of weeks or take them to a ropes course called the Crazy Squirrel. Now Bucha is a byword for war crimes, like Srebrenica or My Lai. Scores of bodies littered the streets when the Russians left. A mass grave still occupies the churchyard. Shops and homes lie vacant, pillaged and burned. More than 400 civilians were found dead here, according to local authorities, nearly all with fatal gunshot wounds. “These were not the victims of shelling or aerial bombardment,” says Mikhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “These were intentional killings, close up and systematic.”
Inside the summer camp for children ages 7 to 16, the Russians set up a garrison from which to terrorize the town, shooting at civilian passersby and bringing prisoners down into the basement. Local officials and witnesses to the violence told me the occupying force displayed a total lack of military discipline. Empty liquor bottles lay among snipers’ nests dug beside a playground. Dirty mattresses and cigarette butts littered an administrative building, which was strewn with an odd trove of loot apparently taken from local homes: an old boom box, costume jewelry, a leather briefcase, none of it valuable enough for the occupiers to carry as they fled. In one room, the Russians left a pile of hair shorn off with clippers. On the floor of another sat two lumps of human excrement. “This was no army,” says Roslik, the camp groundskeeper. “This was a horde.”
Mourners at a mass grave found at the Church of St. Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints in Bucha, April 4Natalie Keyssar
The scenes of depravity they left behind have changed the course of the war in Ukraine. The Russian army’s crimes, described in both Kyiv and Washington as a campaign resembling genocide, have hardened the will of Western governments to arm Ukraine and narrowed the space for a negotiated peace. Leaders from across Europe have come through Bucha to see the devastation for themselves. They emerged voicing new pledges of support for Zelensky, promising more than a billion dollars in military aid from the European Union alone.
“You stand here today and see what happened,” Zelensky told reporters on a visit to Bucha April 4, days after the Russians withdrew. “We know that thousands of people have been killed and tortured,” he added, “with extremities cut off, women raped, children killed.” Less than a week later, at least 50 more Ukrainians—nearly all of them women, children and the -elderly—were slain in a rocket attack against a train station in Kramatorsk, where they had gone to flee the country’s eastern regions, the focus of the war’s next phase.
David Arakhamia, the lead Ukrainian negotiator in talks with Moscow, says Bucha made it difficult to face the envoys of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “We wanted to stop the process altogether,” he told me. “We wanted revenge, not diplomacy.” But Zelensky urged the team to carry on, “even if there is only a 1% chance of peace after Bucha,” says the negotiator, who has continued holding talks with the Russians almost every day.
At the same time, investigators have fanned out across the country to document apparent Russian war crimes. A team of experts from France has come to help Ukraine gather documentation for an international tribunal. “The evidence is mounting,” U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters on April 12. “I called it genocide because it’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out even the idea of being Ukrainian.”
Moscow knows how bad this is. The Foreign Ministry in Moscow has accused Ukraine of “staging” the massacre to make the Russian forces look bad. Putin called Bucha a “fake.” His propaganda channels offered theories to undermine the grim reality with doubt. They suggested that crisis actors had posed as corpses in videos of Bucha. They claimed that “foreign mercenaries” came to town and killed people after the Russians withdrew.
But the barbarity was too blatant, and witnessed by too many people. The local government estimates that around 3,700 people remained in the town during the occupation. Their stories of looting, torture, rape, and murder are consistent with the evidence emerging from the ground.
Gala and her daughter Veronika hid at home throughout the occupation in Bucha. Gala, with blue hair, said that the soldiers would come into her home twice a day threatening to kill them and terrorizing the neighborhood.Natalie Keyssar
Before the invasion, life in Bucha centered around the Church of St. Andrew, whose golden domes reach upward from a hill near city hall. The parish priest, Father Andriy Halavin, was officiating a funeral on the second day of the invasion, Feb. 25, as a battle raged for control of an airport just north of town. Explosions and helicopters ripped through the air, close enough to drown out his sermon at the graveside.
The battle went on for several days. The Russians needed that airport to land an invading force outside the capital, and the Ukrainians put up a ferocious fight, shelling the runways and blowing up a bridge to block the advance of Russian tanks into Kyiv. “All of this was happening over our heads—the flames, the booms,” Halavin recalls.
Control of Bucha changed hands at least twice before the Russians managed to seize the town in the first week of March. The battle had cost them dearly, and it left them angry. More than a dozen burned-out Russian tanks and personnel carriers stood in the streets. As the Russians dug in, they set up artillery positions in a local school and moved into the dormitories at the children’s summer camp.
Halavin considered keeping his church open as a sanctuary for locals. But he says he changed his mind after the Russian troops began going house to house, kicking in doors and dragging entire families into the streets. At one point the church itself came under fire, leaving deep gashes in the walls. “The soldiers were shooting at anything that moved. Men, women, children,” Halavin told me. “To cross the street was to stare death in the eyes.”
The priest stashed away his robes and did his best to stay out of sight. A few times during the monthlong occupation, he snuck back into the church to pray and fetch some candles for his home. By the second week, the smell of death in parts of Bucha became hard to bear. The morgue was full, and it was too dangerous to take bodies to the cemetery. Many victims were left in the road or covered with just enough soil to keep the dogs away.
A local coroner then asked Halavin to help organize a burial in the churchyard. The priest consented. On March 10, they dug a trench and waited for a truck to come from the morgue with a few dozen bodies. “There was no way to have a ceremony or any sermons at the grave,” he says. “It was all done quickly, with a few hurried prayers.”
Children’s toys and bicycles lie inside a damaged apartment building in Bucha on April 3Natalie Keyssar
The trench was still there, in the church’s shadow, when the congregation gathered for Sunday mass on April 10, their first since the end of the occupation. Most of the bodies had already been exhumed and sent to the morgue for identification and a proper burial. A long plastic sheet was draped over those who remained in the pit, to keep the crows at bay.
Olha Ivanitska, an elderly parishioner, saw two of her friends as she limped into the church’s vestibule. She embraced them and touched their cheeks with her hands. “You’re still alive,” she said. “We’re still alive.”
They knew they were lucky. As they emerged from their homes, from their basements and bunkers, the people of Bucha often found their friends missing or dead, their streets full of wrecked military vehicles, their neighbors’ homes shelled into rubble.
Some residents set out to assess the damage and rebuild. Leonid Chernenko, a janitor at School No. 3, came back to work on April 10 to check what the Russians had stolen. “All the computers are gone,” he told me while fumbling with the keys to the boiler room. That was the least of the problems. Sappers had not had time to check the school for booby traps and mines. More than a hundred empty boxes of Russian artillery shells lay in the schoolyard among empty beer bottles and army rations. Most of the windows had been shattered.
Around the school, many of the victims of the Bucha massacre still lie in temporary graves. One of them is at the edge of the children’s summer camp. Igor Kasenok, who lives across the street, told me he dug that grave one day in March. The man inside it had made the mistake of approaching the Russians on foot, Kasenok said. The soldiers shot him and left him there.
Kasenok found the body in the street the next day, when he went to fetch some firewood for the stove in his basement, a cluttered warren he had shared during the occupation with more than 30 of his neighbors and many of their pets. Kasenok gave the dead man the dignity of a burial, fashioning a cross out of some boards. “They could have shot me too for that,” he said while showing me the plot.
A mass grave in Bucha on April 9Sergei Supinsky—AFP/Getty Images
As we spoke, Kasenok’s wife came out, trailed by a pair of cats. We began to talk about their grandchildren. All three of them live around Luhansk, in a part of Ukraine the Russians took in early March. Kasenok and his wife haven’t heard from them since.
The urge to reassure the couple made me stammer, and the only thing that came to mind was the summer camp across the street. I suggested that maybe one day, after Bucha rebuilds, the kids could come visit and play over there. “Better to raze the place,” Kasenok answered. “It’s a place of killing now.”
Beyond its symbolic role, it is the sole vessel in the fleet equipped with wide-area air defences in the form of the S-300F. The Moskva has thus provided air cover to other vessels during their operations, which have included coastal bombardments and amphibious feints.
In the absence of the Moskva, the fleet lacks vessels with a comparable air defence suite, and will thus find it more risky to conduct similar operations.
Though Russia has comparable ships, including two Slava Class Cruisers in the Eastern Mediterranean, it cannot replace the Moskva due to the fact that Turkey has closed access to the straits to the belligerent warships for the duration of the conflict.
Of equal note is the Neptune anti-ship system with which Ukraine claims to have hit the vessel. The R-360 anti-ship cruise missile, which is fired by the Neptune, is a derivative of the Soviet KH-35. It is capable of striking targets at reported ranges of up to 180 miles and has the capacity to fly at sea-skimming altitudes to evade radar detection.
The missile is apparently capable of using GPS guidance in tandem with inertial guidance to improve its accuracy and uses an onboard active radar seeker to detect its target in its final stages before impact.
The missile threat to ships is an old one. What is new, however, is the growing number of actors that field them. In addition to Ukraine, both Hezbollah and the Houthis have utilised older Chinese-made anti-ship cruise missiles against expensive ones in their conflicts with Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The expanding suite of tools to track targets at sea, including commercial satellite networks, open-source data and relatively cheap capabilities like drones, mean that striking maritime targets at reach is no longer something only major powers can do. Incidents such as the striking of the Moskva and the destruction of the Russian amphibious landing vessel Saratov by a Ukrainian Tochka ballistic missile while in port highlight this.
In some ways, this might be cause for celebration. Similar capabilities can be used by other targets of aggression such as Taiwan, for example. However, it may be a mistake to assume that only adversaries will be challenged by these developments, which will make theatre entry harder for all major navies, even against sub-peer opponents.
To be sure, the Moskva has certain weaknesses that a western ship might not. It lacked some of the electronic countermeasures such as the Nulka decoy, which vessels like the USS Mason used to defeat cruise missile attacks, its command and control systems may not meet western standards and its crew may have proven lacking in alertness and discipline.
However, as the sinking of HMS Sheffield should remind us, even well-trained crews can struggle to counter surprise cruise missile strikes which leave them with low warning times.
Over long campaigns, most crews will at some point be at risk of coming under attack when they are not alert. As the ability to strike vessels at sea with cruise missiles and to destroy them in port with ballistic missiles proliferates, power projection may become more difficult for all the great powers.
Dr Sidharth Kaushal is a Research Fellow at The Royal United Services Institute
Russia’s loss of its Black Sea flagship Moskva is a ‘massive blow,’ and maybe also ‘poetic justice’
Peter Weber, Senior editor – April 14, 2022
Russian warship Moskva Burak Akay/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Russian and Ukraine agree that the Russian missile cruiser Moskva, its Black Sea flagship, was taken out of commission on Wednesday, but there’s no agreement on how that happened. Russian state-run media, citing the Defense Ministry, said “ammunition detonated as a result of a fire on the Moskva missile cruiser,” the ship “was seriously damaged,” and “the entire crew” of 510 was evacuated. Hours earlier, the governor of Odessa said Ukraine had hit the ship with Neptune anti-ship missiles and inflicted “very serious damage.”
Either way, “one of the Russian Navy’s most important warships is either floating abandoned or at the bottom of the Black Sea, a massive blow to a military struggling against Ukrainian resistance 50 days into Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his neighbor,” CNN reports. And “whatever the reason for the fire, the analysts say it strikes hard at the heart of the Russian navy as well as national pride, comparable to the U.S. Navy losing a battleship during World War II or an aircraft carrier today.”
Alessio Patalano, professor of war and strategy at King’s College in London, said losing the Moskva would be a “massive blow” for Russia.
“Only the loss of a ballistic missile submarine or the Kutznetsov,” Russia’s lone aircraft carrier, “would inflict a more serious blow to Russian morale and the navy’s reputation with the Russian public,” retired U.S. Navy Capt. Carl Schuster, former director of operations at the U.S. Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center, tells CNN.
It is “a significant setback for Russia’s war effort, for both military and morale reasons,” and the Moskva’s demise would “be seen as poetic justice in Ukraine,” since it was the warship that told Ukrainian forces to surrender on Snake Island early in the war, only be told to “go f–k yourself,” BBC News reports. “In more practical terms, this incident is likely to result in Russian warships having to move further offshore for their own safety,” and the Moskva has been a thorn in Ukraine’s side since the invasion began, “loitering offshore and menacing” Odessa.
Russia admits Black Sea flagship ‘seriously damaged’ as Ukraine claims missile strike
Niamh Cavanagh, Producer – April 14, 2022
LONDON — Russian officials said their flagship Black Sea vessel was “seriously damaged” in what Ukrainian officials claimed was a missile strike against the warship Moskva.
Defense Ministry officials in Moscow said on Thursday that the explosion on the Moskva, a warship leading the country’s naval assault against Ukraine, was “due to a fire” and said that “ammunition exploded on board.” They added that the crew, believed to include around 500 sailors, were all safely evacuated from the burning ship. The ministry said the fire is now under investigation.
However, the governor of Odesa claimed the damage was a result of a Ukrainian missile strike.
The Russian navy’s guided missile cruiser Moskva sails into the port of Sevastopol, Crimea. (Alexey Pavlishak/Reuters)
“It has been confirmed that the missile cruiser Moskva today went exactly where it was sent by our border guards on Snake Island!” the governor, Maksym Marchenko, said in a post on Telegram. “Neptune missiles protecting the Black Sea have caused significant damage to this Russian ship.”
The Neptune is a Ukrainian-made anti-ship weapon that came into operation just last year, and its design is based on the Soviet Kh-35 cruise missile. The launchers are mounted on trucks and can hit targets up to roughly 175 miles away, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Neither Russia’s nor Ukraine’s claims have been independently verified, and it’s not clear if the ship was entirely disabled. National security adviser Jake Sullivan said early Thursday that the U.S. cannot confirm Ukraine’s claims of hitting the ship but did say it was a “big blow to Russia.”
Alessio Patalano, a professor of war and strategy at King’s College London, told CNN that losing the flagship vessel would be a “massive blow” for Russian forces. “Ships operate away from public attention, and their activities are rarely the subject of news,” he said. “But they are large floating pieces of national territory, and when you lose one, a flagship no less, the political and symbolic message — in addition to the military loss — stands out precisely because of it.”
Two Ukrainian sources confirmed to Sky News that the 13,780-ton warship had been hit by missiles launched by Ukraine. “She is on fire,” one of the sources said of the warship. “The level of damage is being clarified. … She is about 25 nautical miles from Snake Island.”
The Moskva is the ship that tried to attack Snake Island in February on the day Russia invaded Ukraine. The warship approached the island in the Black Sea and ordered 13 Ukrainian soldiers to surrender. However, the Ukrainian soldiers told the Moskva to “go f*** yourself.” After the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the soldiers “died heroically but did not give up.” It was later reported by the country’s navy that they had been captured alive by Russia. According to the Ukrainian Parliament, the soldiers were later released in a prisoner swap.
Ukrainian service member Roman Gribov, who was captured by Russian troops on Snake Island on Feb. 24 and swapped for Russian POWs, receives an award from military official Ihor Taburets in Cherkasy, Ukraine. (Press service of the Cherkasy Regional Military Administration/Handout via Reuters)
The warship has led the naval assault on Ukraine, making it an important military target. Moskva has been a naval power in the Black Sea since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It carries a number of anti-submarine and mine-torpedo weapons and holds over a dozen Vulkan anti-ship missiles.
If the Moskva is lost, it will be the second Russian warship to be destroyed by the Ukrainian military. On March 25, officials from Ukraine said they had struck a landing ship, named by Ukrainian forces as the Saratov, at the port of Berdyansk the day before. Videos from social media showed fires raging and smoke billowing from the docks, which had been occupied by Russian forces.
U.S. targets seven Belarus national carrier planes for violating export controls
David Shepardson – April 14, 2022
FILE PHOTO: A Boeing 737-800 plane of Belarusian state carrier Belavia takes off at the Domodedovo Airport outside Moscow
(Reuters) -The U.S. Commerce Department on Thursday confirmed it had identified seven Boeing 737 Planes operated by Belarusian national carrier Belavia that are in apparent violation of U.S. export controls.
The seven Belarusian-operated aircraft are the first to be identified since restrictions on Belarus were tightened last week. The Commerce Department said restrictions that bar them from operating services abroad should effectively ground them from future international flights.
The list of planes subject to restrictions, imposed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now includes 146 Russian-owned or operated aircraft and seven Belarusian aircraft
Belavia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The export controls bar companies around the world from providing any refueling, maintenance, repair, or spare parts or services to the identified airplanes.
The Commerce Department actions are part of the Biden administration’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which the department said Belarus has enabled and supported.
Deputy Commerce Secretary Don Graves said: “By rejecting the international rule of law, Russia and Belarus have made it clear that they do not deserve the benefits of participating in the global economy, and that includes international travel.”
Last week, the department stepped up its crackdown against Russian airlines, slapping Aeroflot, Azur Air, and UTair with enforcement actions for violating American export controls.
The enforcement action denies the three Russian carriers export privileges and targets the entire airlines, not just specific planes. The U.S. government believes the actions will over time make the carriers largely unable to continue flights.
Previously, the United States had identified more than 170 Boeing planes that Russian airlines were operating in violation of U.S. sanctions, including about 40 Aeroflot Boeing 737 and 777 planes, 21 Azur Boeing planes and 17 UTair Boeing aircraft. It has removed some that have left Russia.
The United States, European Union and other countries have barred Russian planes from U.S. airspace.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by David Holmes)
